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Tuesday, September 29, 2009
The History of EDI
by Burt Webb  Rapid and accurate exchange of information is critical for effective business transactions between companies. Each new communication technology that evolved was adapted for business purposes. The telegraph, radio, telephone and now the Internet have all been recruited to improve business communication.  The roots of EDI can be traced to the 1948 Berlin Airlift. There was an enormous problem in coordinating the consignments of food and other consumables that were arriving by air from many different origins. The problem’s solution lay in creating a standard manifest to replace all the different manifests in different languages and formats.   Around 1960, a number of different businesses in the transportation and retail industries began exploring the application of electronic communication to improve the processing and transfer of business documents to speed up transportation of goods and reduce transportation and administrative costs. This type of operation came to be known as Electronic Document Exchange or EDI. These methods were proprietary and required each company to develop separate systems to deal with each other company with whom they carried out EDI.   Then different industries began to develop standards for electronic business communication and processing within their industries including transportation, pharmaceuticals, groceries, automobiles, and banking. In 1968, a group of railroad companies formed an organization to study the problems with the quality of inter-company exchanges of transportation data and to improve it. This organization was called the Transportation Data Coordinating Committee (TDCC). The TDCC acted to oversee the development of translation rules among four different sets of industry-specific standards and published the first standard in 1975. This improved a great deal of intercompany communication but companies from different industries still could not use EDI to communicate.  The main focus of the TDCC was on the content of the messages rather than the communication method. They developed the concept of the “transaction set” which corresponded to the use of standard paper business forms.  Transaction set messages are composed of “data segments” which can be thought of as individual lines of information. Each segment or line contains “data elements” which correspond to data fields.   In 1978, the TDCC was renamed the Electronic Data Interchange Association (EDIA) and chartered by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) to work on a national standard for EDI. In 1979, it became the Accredited Standards Committee (ASC) for EDI X.12 format development.   In 1984, the UK Department of Customs and Excise in cooperation with the British Simplification of Trade Procedures Board began work on its own electronic document standards called Tradacoms for use in international trade. The